As part of my new job at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre I am responsible for planning, organizing and promoting many of the Centre's educational events, including the upcoming Shafran Teacher's Conference (February 11, 2011).
Although a great deal of planning and organization for the conference was already underway when I joined the team at the VHEC (thank you, Nina Krieger!), one of the ways that I have been able to contribute so far was in promoting the event online. Last week I approached Joel Ralph at Canada's History Magazine about the event and he was kind enough to post our conference flyer on his website and put it in the magazine's newsletter which is distributed to teachers and interested historians across Canada. I was also able to write a blog post for ActiveHistory.ca about the event, combining the conference's existing publicity materials with my own experiences as a teacher (in order to better fit the style of writing for that publication).
To be honest, I'm not sure that promoting the Shafran Teacher's Conference in either of these publications will have an impact on actual conference registration numbers. After all, the VHEC is promoting this event to a very select group of people: teachers in British Columbia (specifically those in Vancouver and surrounding areas) with an interest in Holocaust Education. The audiences for both Canada's History Magazine and ActiveHistory.ca, on the other hand, are nationwide and not entirely made up of educators. Thus, a large number of people who read the announcement for the conference will either a) not find it applicable to them or b) find it applicable but be unable to attend due to travel and/or time constraints.
Despite all that, I don't think that my time was wasted in choosing to publicize the event in this way. Now, two national audiences with readership in the thousands, have had some exposure to the VHEC's name and a little taste of the type of programming that we do. Even if this specific event wasn't up their alley, perhaps future ones will be. Or, maybe the next time they need something Holocaust-related, they'll think to approach the VHEC for referrals, resources or information. You just never know. :)
